Cake (Donghae/Sungmin)
Cake
Donghae/Sungmin, PG-13, 2370 words
A/N: Also for SJ100.
The chance that you'd die from a snake bite is said to be about one in a hundred thousand.
Dying from flesh-eating bacteria? One in a million.
You have a one in three million chance of spotting a UFO.
You wonder though, because you don't know, what the chances are of a homeless person breaking into your apartment and huddling in your bed--with you in it.
Probably not so high.
Just in this building, maybe one in fifty.
In that case, it could really happen to anyone, but you'd have a better chance of getting hemorrhoids (one in twenty-five).
And yet here you are.
You wake up before he gets in bed with you, not because he made any sounds, rampaged violently across your spotless living room, or broke every bottle in your extraordinarily expensive wine collection. You almost wish he did.
No, it's his smell. The stench is amazing. Like trash that's piled for weeks. Months, maybe. You're not really sure because you don't stop to smell the dumpster often. Your nightly ritual is to empty your trash bins, like any truly neat person would.
He smells like piss and smoke and rot from the street. Like a sewer, oh god, he smells like every piece of shit left in the toilets of public restrooms and he's in your bed. And holding you.
You jump up. You try, and you fail. He's surprisingly strong, clamping you down with one arm and one leg.
Who are you, you ask. Damn, your voice shook.
"Stop moving, I'm trying to sleep," he scolds. He's annoyed. Why is he annoyed when you're the one that's being disturbed?
At some point, he falls asleep and you still can't move because he's latched onto your back like the putrid waste on his. And you can't sleep. The stench is... truly amazing. Hold your breath, hold your breath, but you can't hold it forever.
It's hours before you realize you did fall asleep and he's gone, but you know he was there because the smell. The smell lingers like it's yours.
You get up, you look around. Your belongings remain undisturbed, unscathed. Alright, you decide, nothing ever happened. Just wash up, go to work, mindlessly enter numbers into a computer for nine hours, get some groceries, maybe takeout, and come home for dinner.
You don't expect to come in the door and see him lounging on your couch.
Why are you back, you demand.
He looks away from his magazine, your magazine, to smile at you. A big, gleaming bright smile. In that second, you doubt that he's homeless - homeless people don't have bright smiles - but then you get a whiff of him and take your suspicions back.
"Chill, man," he says, "Just chill. You have extra space and I'm using it. Nothin' wrong with that."
There is. This is my home. You broke in here without my permission. There are many things wrong with this, you say. You're angry, about to bust at the neck, and he just laughs like a kid that's proud of the bad little things he's done.
"Naw, you don't get it! I don't hurt you, you don't hurt me, we live in peace and I'll be out of your hair quick," he says. "Nothin' wrong with that."
And when he flicks out a switchblade to carve out the flower bouquet from an advertisement, you find yourself swiftly walking to the kitchen and starting dinner.
The odds of being murdered are one in 18 thousand.
It goes like this for a week, maybe two, and it eventually becomes three and then four.
You'd come in and he'd be cutting flowers from magazines and newspapers and eating your food and watching your TV. At night, he'd be sleeping in your bed and huddling in your warmth and smothering you with his odors.
Strangely, you get used to it.
When you hit week five, it occurs to you, fleetingly, vaguely, that you still don't know why he's in your home.
Why me, you ask. Why here?
He cocks his head like he'd told you before but you forgot. "Why not?" he replies.
Too obvious.
At week six, he breaks into your storage closet and takes out your guitar. You come home to find him strumming fake chords, but singing like a pro.
"Play for me," he says, nodding at the instrument as he hands it to you. He stares at your hands, curious, wondering how good you are, waiting to judge your choice of song.
You haven't touched your guitar in years and it's lighter than you remember. So many hard times, callused fingers when you were learning, so many time you had wanted to give up and toss it over a bridge.
You test a note. Then, a chord, tuning it a bit. The music comes out sweeter than you remember. Slowly, you start singing along to the first song you performed at your high school talent festival. He sings your harmony and your living room becomes a stage. Your audience is each other.
He's good, and you're good, and if you had met sooner - before your ambitions morphed into data collecting and tax consulting, before your dreams went to pot - you think you would've had something. The two of you would've been famous.
Under all his grime, this homeless bum could have been something. Someone. And you could have been someone, too.
He disappears the week after.
He's gone without a single remnant he was ever there except for his smell that stays like a scar formed from a festering wound. You don't wonder if he'll come back because you're sure he will. You contemplate changing the lock, but he'd gotten in once; no doubt he could do it again. It can't be so simple, but when another week rolls by coming home to rooms free of mess and the stink you so carefully purged, you become uneasy. You've settled back into your old routine and it is painfully quiet.
The guitar now sits on the coffee table and you play it sometimes.
You watch for news of suicides or dead homeless John Does. You don't want to, but there is nothing else to occupy your mind.
You start hallucinating, seeing him around when there's no reason he should be. When you walk home, when you go to the store, when you stop at your parents' to pick up some homemade kimchi. It isn't until you're on a lunch break, in line for a sandwich, that you realize that you might not be seeing things.
You recognize his parka, a dirty black once blue, and the endless grayed and fading scarves around his neck, like he wants to drown in the coarse, stinking fabric. He's walking towards the dangerous side of town and you hesitate to follow.
Don't want to know, do want, don't, do, don't, do--Lunch isn't important. You drop everything, leave the sandwich, and dash to catch up.
A left here, a right there, turn the corner into an alleyway and you're underground. You're in a maze. It's a labyrinth. You trail as close to him as possible; you won't find your way back on your own.
"A girl I loved once lived here," he says. To the air. To you, so you step out and walk closer. He turns to you and grins. "You came after me."
I didn't, you say.
"Okay, you came after you, but that's a little self-absorbed, don't you think?"
He doesn't make sense. You say nothing.
"A girl I loved once lived here," he says again. "I tried to make her love me back." He stares at a connecting pipe melded to the building exteriors, stares and stares like that girl is watching him from that spot. You suppress a shudder, and he turns to throw an arm around you. "Let's go home."
Don't you have your own home? you ask. Why are you coming back to mine?
"Why not?"
Too obvious.
The next day, you come home to a kitchen that is not yours.
It's not yours because your kitchen does not have dirty bowls and pans and spoons strewn about the counter. Your kitchen does not have flour layered on every surface like a bag of it exploded there.
The kitchen is yours though, because it is in your apartment, and he is standing square in the middle of all the mess, cracked eggshells in his hair, covered in a white powdery substance, and singing while icing a cake.
"Just in time," he says, so cheerfully that you might've forgotten your horror at the bottle of vanilla extract on its side, spilling its contents over your once fresh wooden cabinet panels.
"I baked this for dessert," he says, holding it out like a taunt.
At that moment a thought crosses your mind. A thought that tells you he's lying. It's store bought. It's store bought and laced with poison to finally kill you.
The kitchen mess is a facade. He cannot have made that cake. That cake could not have been made by those dirt crusted hands.
It's smooth, it's clean and pristine and everything he isn't, a complete opposite of everything that represents who he is in your mind.
The cake is you.
You wouldn't be surprised if it is laced with poison. You smile and decline, and he frowns. He looks forlorn almost. Not the face of a killer disappointed, but like a dog you just kicked.
The chance of dying from food poisoning is one in three million.
You put your groceries away, call for takeout (cooking is cleaning) and pray for minimal damage.
No one dies.
He even writes your name on it in chocolate scrawl.
"Sungmin, right?" he asks. "I looked at your mail," he adds when you stare. It doesn't even hit you that he sorted through your things.
"Oh, Donghae," he grins, flourishing the last letter of your name. "That's me. Lee Donghae."
As usual, when it comes time to sleep, he clutches you tight from behind like you imagine poverty clings to his. You can barely breathe (thankfully, because you've gotten used to it, doesn't mean you've lost your olfactories). That night though, he whispers your name into your back.
You sleep like you haven't in years. Like you'd been asleep for years and only just woke up.
The odds of your coming into being, that particular sperm reaching that particular egg, is one in 72 trillion.
You don't know how else you could have ended up, but you ended up like this. Looking like this, feeling like this, reacting like this. Like this, is how you ended up letting yourself forget your ambition, letting yourself wander and fall into a dull and lifeless state of mediocrity. You could have been something. Someone. And instead, you are like this.
Donghae knows what you are like, or he doesn't and just knows how to fake it. He fakes it pretty well, if so.
In the morning, he takes out your Lafitte red Bordeaux and tells you to drink it with cake. You're hesitant.
It'd take an hour to decant, you explain. I need to go to work.
His face contorts into this frown. It reminds you of a cross between your mother and a puppy you once helped dogsit. It died the day your friend came back from his business trip.
You call in sick.
It ends up that he eats the rest of the cake and you drink all the wine.
You're not drunk, you're not drunk... you're not... drunk... And you're playing your guitar. Your fingers won't reach the right strings, and yet music comes out sounding pretty damn good.
Will you disappear again? you wonder aloud. Will you let me fall back into my old life?
"I didn't know you had a new one," he... Donghae laughs, brushing your bangs out of your eyes.
You didn't know either. Before he came along, you had forgotten what it was like to sit and drink and enjoy. Maybe you never knew how. Maybe he taught you. Maybe he's teaching you now.
It's because you didn't know about the old one, you reply to him.
His eyes gleam as clean as his smile and the words tumble out your mouth without sobriety to filter it.
You need a fucking shower, dammit, you smell like a godforsaken bathroom, you say, and he eyes your face, cheeks already hot and burning like your throat and your shoulders and your entire body.
"Would you like to give me one?"
There's a feeling you can't place when he says that. It's a familiar swirl in your mind, swirling tight grip of something, like when you were younger and your little brother was getting beat by some punk in his class. After you beat the little fucker up, you persuaded your brother to come with you to take taekwondo.
Why did you think of that? Beat the dirt for Donghae and then teach him how to bathe later.
You don't make sense. It must be catching.
Next thing you know, you're washing his hair. The eggshells from last night were still there and he's less dirty but more pungent under his clothes. You want to burn them, but you might do better just throwing them out.
"You're making me smell like apples," he says, fluttering his eyes open. Is he complaining?
What do you want to smell like? you ask.
"Flowers. Roses." Donghae smiles, shutting his eyelids and leans back against you. Shampoo suds dampen your shirt. "Then I'd be a rose and can give myself to the one I love."
That's a little naive, you reply.
"And a little genius."
The infant mortality rate in this country is one in 250.
The truth is, you are not special, but you are a wonder of the world.
If you could relive your life over, you'd choose to be someone. You'd choose to remake yourself to be someone worthy of the life you've been given.
The truth is, you can't.
Something else occurs to you though, as Donghae walks out in your clothes. His face is free of black smudges and you can see his form without his jacket. His hands are rough and darker than his arms, but clean.
When he burrows himself at your back, he doesn't smell, but there is an odor you could pick out of a landfill. It's the odor that carried you through sleepless stinking nights. It's a fragrance, a small and subtle scent. It's Donghae.
The chance of meeting Donghae had been one in fifty.
He breathes your name against your back.
-
I'll admit, I had problems with the original pornaloud prompt, but I realized I could combine it with the sj100 challenge and the cake scene popped in my head. But I still had no idea what to do with 'Underground'. Then I watched "Why Did You Come To My House?" and lunatic!Donghae was born.
He didn't end up as crazy as I had imagined :| But... I feel awesome that I did this over the span of two days |D And well before the deadline!
Donghae/Sungmin, PG-13, 2370 words
A/N: Also for SJ100.
The chance that you'd die from a snake bite is said to be about one in a hundred thousand.
Dying from flesh-eating bacteria? One in a million.
You have a one in three million chance of spotting a UFO.
You wonder though, because you don't know, what the chances are of a homeless person breaking into your apartment and huddling in your bed--with you in it.
Probably not so high.
Just in this building, maybe one in fifty.
In that case, it could really happen to anyone, but you'd have a better chance of getting hemorrhoids (one in twenty-five).
And yet here you are.
You wake up before he gets in bed with you, not because he made any sounds, rampaged violently across your spotless living room, or broke every bottle in your extraordinarily expensive wine collection. You almost wish he did.
No, it's his smell. The stench is amazing. Like trash that's piled for weeks. Months, maybe. You're not really sure because you don't stop to smell the dumpster often. Your nightly ritual is to empty your trash bins, like any truly neat person would.
He smells like piss and smoke and rot from the street. Like a sewer, oh god, he smells like every piece of shit left in the toilets of public restrooms and he's in your bed. And holding you.
You jump up. You try, and you fail. He's surprisingly strong, clamping you down with one arm and one leg.
Who are you, you ask. Damn, your voice shook.
"Stop moving, I'm trying to sleep," he scolds. He's annoyed. Why is he annoyed when you're the one that's being disturbed?
At some point, he falls asleep and you still can't move because he's latched onto your back like the putrid waste on his. And you can't sleep. The stench is... truly amazing. Hold your breath, hold your breath, but you can't hold it forever.
It's hours before you realize you did fall asleep and he's gone, but you know he was there because the smell. The smell lingers like it's yours.
You get up, you look around. Your belongings remain undisturbed, unscathed. Alright, you decide, nothing ever happened. Just wash up, go to work, mindlessly enter numbers into a computer for nine hours, get some groceries, maybe takeout, and come home for dinner.
You don't expect to come in the door and see him lounging on your couch.
Why are you back, you demand.
He looks away from his magazine, your magazine, to smile at you. A big, gleaming bright smile. In that second, you doubt that he's homeless - homeless people don't have bright smiles - but then you get a whiff of him and take your suspicions back.
"Chill, man," he says, "Just chill. You have extra space and I'm using it. Nothin' wrong with that."
There is. This is my home. You broke in here without my permission. There are many things wrong with this, you say. You're angry, about to bust at the neck, and he just laughs like a kid that's proud of the bad little things he's done.
"Naw, you don't get it! I don't hurt you, you don't hurt me, we live in peace and I'll be out of your hair quick," he says. "Nothin' wrong with that."
And when he flicks out a switchblade to carve out the flower bouquet from an advertisement, you find yourself swiftly walking to the kitchen and starting dinner.
The odds of being murdered are one in 18 thousand.
It goes like this for a week, maybe two, and it eventually becomes three and then four.
You'd come in and he'd be cutting flowers from magazines and newspapers and eating your food and watching your TV. At night, he'd be sleeping in your bed and huddling in your warmth and smothering you with his odors.
Strangely, you get used to it.
When you hit week five, it occurs to you, fleetingly, vaguely, that you still don't know why he's in your home.
Why me, you ask. Why here?
He cocks his head like he'd told you before but you forgot. "Why not?" he replies.
Too obvious.
At week six, he breaks into your storage closet and takes out your guitar. You come home to find him strumming fake chords, but singing like a pro.
"Play for me," he says, nodding at the instrument as he hands it to you. He stares at your hands, curious, wondering how good you are, waiting to judge your choice of song.
You haven't touched your guitar in years and it's lighter than you remember. So many hard times, callused fingers when you were learning, so many time you had wanted to give up and toss it over a bridge.
You test a note. Then, a chord, tuning it a bit. The music comes out sweeter than you remember. Slowly, you start singing along to the first song you performed at your high school talent festival. He sings your harmony and your living room becomes a stage. Your audience is each other.
He's good, and you're good, and if you had met sooner - before your ambitions morphed into data collecting and tax consulting, before your dreams went to pot - you think you would've had something. The two of you would've been famous.
Under all his grime, this homeless bum could have been something. Someone. And you could have been someone, too.
He disappears the week after.
He's gone without a single remnant he was ever there except for his smell that stays like a scar formed from a festering wound. You don't wonder if he'll come back because you're sure he will. You contemplate changing the lock, but he'd gotten in once; no doubt he could do it again. It can't be so simple, but when another week rolls by coming home to rooms free of mess and the stink you so carefully purged, you become uneasy. You've settled back into your old routine and it is painfully quiet.
The guitar now sits on the coffee table and you play it sometimes.
You watch for news of suicides or dead homeless John Does. You don't want to, but there is nothing else to occupy your mind.
You start hallucinating, seeing him around when there's no reason he should be. When you walk home, when you go to the store, when you stop at your parents' to pick up some homemade kimchi. It isn't until you're on a lunch break, in line for a sandwich, that you realize that you might not be seeing things.
You recognize his parka, a dirty black once blue, and the endless grayed and fading scarves around his neck, like he wants to drown in the coarse, stinking fabric. He's walking towards the dangerous side of town and you hesitate to follow.
Don't want to know, do want, don't, do, don't, do--Lunch isn't important. You drop everything, leave the sandwich, and dash to catch up.
A left here, a right there, turn the corner into an alleyway and you're underground. You're in a maze. It's a labyrinth. You trail as close to him as possible; you won't find your way back on your own.
"A girl I loved once lived here," he says. To the air. To you, so you step out and walk closer. He turns to you and grins. "You came after me."
I didn't, you say.
"Okay, you came after you, but that's a little self-absorbed, don't you think?"
He doesn't make sense. You say nothing.
"A girl I loved once lived here," he says again. "I tried to make her love me back." He stares at a connecting pipe melded to the building exteriors, stares and stares like that girl is watching him from that spot. You suppress a shudder, and he turns to throw an arm around you. "Let's go home."
Don't you have your own home? you ask. Why are you coming back to mine?
"Why not?"
Too obvious.
The next day, you come home to a kitchen that is not yours.
It's not yours because your kitchen does not have dirty bowls and pans and spoons strewn about the counter. Your kitchen does not have flour layered on every surface like a bag of it exploded there.
The kitchen is yours though, because it is in your apartment, and he is standing square in the middle of all the mess, cracked eggshells in his hair, covered in a white powdery substance, and singing while icing a cake.
"Just in time," he says, so cheerfully that you might've forgotten your horror at the bottle of vanilla extract on its side, spilling its contents over your once fresh wooden cabinet panels.
"I baked this for dessert," he says, holding it out like a taunt.
At that moment a thought crosses your mind. A thought that tells you he's lying. It's store bought. It's store bought and laced with poison to finally kill you.
The kitchen mess is a facade. He cannot have made that cake. That cake could not have been made by those dirt crusted hands.
It's smooth, it's clean and pristine and everything he isn't, a complete opposite of everything that represents who he is in your mind.
The cake is you.
You wouldn't be surprised if it is laced with poison. You smile and decline, and he frowns. He looks forlorn almost. Not the face of a killer disappointed, but like a dog you just kicked.
The chance of dying from food poisoning is one in three million.
You put your groceries away, call for takeout (cooking is cleaning) and pray for minimal damage.
No one dies.
He even writes your name on it in chocolate scrawl.
"Sungmin, right?" he asks. "I looked at your mail," he adds when you stare. It doesn't even hit you that he sorted through your things.
"Oh, Donghae," he grins, flourishing the last letter of your name. "That's me. Lee Donghae."
As usual, when it comes time to sleep, he clutches you tight from behind like you imagine poverty clings to his. You can barely breathe (thankfully, because you've gotten used to it, doesn't mean you've lost your olfactories). That night though, he whispers your name into your back.
You sleep like you haven't in years. Like you'd been asleep for years and only just woke up.
The odds of your coming into being, that particular sperm reaching that particular egg, is one in 72 trillion.
You don't know how else you could have ended up, but you ended up like this. Looking like this, feeling like this, reacting like this. Like this, is how you ended up letting yourself forget your ambition, letting yourself wander and fall into a dull and lifeless state of mediocrity. You could have been something. Someone. And instead, you are like this.
Donghae knows what you are like, or he doesn't and just knows how to fake it. He fakes it pretty well, if so.
In the morning, he takes out your Lafitte red Bordeaux and tells you to drink it with cake. You're hesitant.
It'd take an hour to decant, you explain. I need to go to work.
His face contorts into this frown. It reminds you of a cross between your mother and a puppy you once helped dogsit. It died the day your friend came back from his business trip.
You call in sick.
It ends up that he eats the rest of the cake and you drink all the wine.
You're not drunk, you're not drunk... you're not... drunk... And you're playing your guitar. Your fingers won't reach the right strings, and yet music comes out sounding pretty damn good.
Will you disappear again? you wonder aloud. Will you let me fall back into my old life?
"I didn't know you had a new one," he... Donghae laughs, brushing your bangs out of your eyes.
You didn't know either. Before he came along, you had forgotten what it was like to sit and drink and enjoy. Maybe you never knew how. Maybe he taught you. Maybe he's teaching you now.
It's because you didn't know about the old one, you reply to him.
His eyes gleam as clean as his smile and the words tumble out your mouth without sobriety to filter it.
You need a fucking shower, dammit, you smell like a godforsaken bathroom, you say, and he eyes your face, cheeks already hot and burning like your throat and your shoulders and your entire body.
"Would you like to give me one?"
There's a feeling you can't place when he says that. It's a familiar swirl in your mind, swirling tight grip of something, like when you were younger and your little brother was getting beat by some punk in his class. After you beat the little fucker up, you persuaded your brother to come with you to take taekwondo.
Why did you think of that? Beat the dirt for Donghae and then teach him how to bathe later.
You don't make sense. It must be catching.
Next thing you know, you're washing his hair. The eggshells from last night were still there and he's less dirty but more pungent under his clothes. You want to burn them, but you might do better just throwing them out.
"You're making me smell like apples," he says, fluttering his eyes open. Is he complaining?
What do you want to smell like? you ask.
"Flowers. Roses." Donghae smiles, shutting his eyelids and leans back against you. Shampoo suds dampen your shirt. "Then I'd be a rose and can give myself to the one I love."
That's a little naive, you reply.
"And a little genius."
The infant mortality rate in this country is one in 250.
The truth is, you are not special, but you are a wonder of the world.
If you could relive your life over, you'd choose to be someone. You'd choose to remake yourself to be someone worthy of the life you've been given.
The truth is, you can't.
Something else occurs to you though, as Donghae walks out in your clothes. His face is free of black smudges and you can see his form without his jacket. His hands are rough and darker than his arms, but clean.
When he burrows himself at your back, he doesn't smell, but there is an odor you could pick out of a landfill. It's the odor that carried you through sleepless stinking nights. It's a fragrance, a small and subtle scent. It's Donghae.
The chance of meeting Donghae had been one in fifty.
He breathes your name against your back.
-
I'll admit, I had problems with the original pornaloud prompt, but I realized I could combine it with the sj100 challenge and the cake scene popped in my head. But I still had no idea what to do with 'Underground'. Then I watched "Why Did You Come To My House?" and lunatic!Donghae was born.
He didn't end up as crazy as I had imagined :| But... I feel awesome that I did this over the span of two days |D And well before the deadline!